Cell Project Space

 

The Living River, the first UK solo exhibition by Bordeaux-based Iranian artist Armineh Negahdari affirms her persistent commitment to drawing as a practice, while evoking a state of suspended contemplation for the viewer. The exhibition is driven by the artist’s sense of urgency in the face of moments, actions or memories being lost. 

 

Negahdari’s practice unfolds without prior planning and is immersed in an intense flow where line is guided by intuition. Drawing runs as a continuous thread throughout her work – across oil, graphite, and charcoal – reflecting a sustained commitment to the legitimacy of her thoughts and actions. Equally rapid are her marks that push against the limits of the sparse mediums she employs, where traces give form to thought as it unfolds. Embedded in the fabric of her daily life, her practice has become ritual. Through repetition, she navigates between tension and moments of collapse; compelled by necessity and sustained through constant renewal, each gesture returns to the self. Lines and traces may appear as figures that are never fixed: they slip between human, botanical, and animal condition. A flower head becomes a face; a limb, merges into terrain. These unstable bodies evade narrative finality, inviting prolonged attention to processes of change. 

 

When Negahdari’s drawing extends beyond paper, it momentarily inhabits the realms of her daily life; fabric scraps, thread, and wire are co-opted as surface, carrying the quiet residues of her routine. Seeming to spill into provisional spaces, these objects hold their own histories and resistances. Graphite and smudged oil traces disperse across assemblages while unstable forms are wrapped in cloth to create new structures.

 

As poetry evokes meaning without fixing it by moving through rhythm and form, her works similarly unfold in resistance to rigid logic, becoming sites where singular presence insists rather than resolves. Poetry persists as a condition within Nagadari’s practice from where the exhibition takes its title. For Shams Langeroudi, the living river does not represent, but enact: a rise and recession, a pulse, a continuous deferral that folds inevitability into movement. Water circulates here not only as image but as method. Its flow and recurrence, both stated and displaced operate as material and metaphor, though they are never fully contained.

 

For Armineh Negahdari, nature and landscape are not subjects but conditions; fields through which perception, memory, and movement unfold. The recurring metaphor of the river threads through this exhibition: not as image, but as orientation. A state of continual passage. Of moving forward without settling into fixed form. In this, her work resists closure. It remains in motion; open, unfolding ; where meaning, like water is carried, shaped, and never fully held.

 

 

A film programme has been conceived collaboratively by the artist and curator Anne-Sophie Dinant and will be presented at Cinéma Lumière, London in conjunction to the exhibition. Exploring how Negahdari’s work resonates with cinematic language, it will include rarely screened works by pioneering film-makers Takahiko Iimura, Abbas Kiarostami, Stella F. Simon and Miklós Bándy, Agnès Varda. Across these works, the programme traces a shared language between drawing and film. A language that conveys the evocative power of images.